The human rights organization Cubalex documented this Monday 18 incidents related to solitary confinement or isolation in Cuban prisons during the first 26 days of October 2026, according to the monitoring report published by the organization.
With this figure, October becomes the third month of the year with the most records in this category, following July—which has 26 events—and April, with 23. The report positions isolation as a recurring practice within the Cuban penitentiary system, rather than an exceptional phenomenon.
Throughout 2026, up until this Monday, 95 individuals are listed in at least one event related to punishment cells or isolation in the organization's records. Cubalex clarifies that this data comes from their continuous monitoring and is not an official census, and that the number of events alone does not allow for determining the continuous duration of isolation or automatically establishing its legal qualification.
Among the cases with the highest number of accumulated records for the year are Danisbel Labrada Morales and Fausto René Ramos Ramírez, each with nine events; Ediolvis Marín Mora, with seven; Virgilio Mantilla Arango and Pedro Carlos Camacho Ochoa, each with six; and Aliesky Calderín Acosta and Alexander Fábregas Milanés, each with five. All are political prisoners.
Cubalex points out potential situations of prolonged isolation in the cases of Calderín Acosta, Labrada Morales, Ramos Ramírez, Mantilla Arango, and the opposition member Félix Navarro Rodríguez, although it warns that each case requires an individualized assessment considering the actual conditions of confinement, available human contact, and the health consequences for each person.
The organization emphasizes that the recurrence of incidents against the same individual "does allow for the identification of cases that require closer scrutiny, verification of possible patterns of punishment, and documentation of the conditions faced by those in detention."
The international framework for evaluating these practices is the UN Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules. Rule 44 defines isolation as separation for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, and considers prolonged isolation to be that which exceeds 15 consecutive days. Rules 43 and 45 prohibit indefinite and prolonged isolation as a disciplinary sanction, stating that it can only be applied as a last resort, for the shortest time possible, and subject to independent review.
The balance for October reflects a trend documented throughout the year. The semi-annual report from Cubalex, published in August, recorded 85 incidents of solitary confinement during the first half of 2026, out of a total of 1,894 human rights violations —an increase of 48% compared to the second half of 2025—.
In September, Cuban prisons concentrated most of the documented repression: nearly half of the 298 repressive events of the month affected incarcerated individuals, and the communication blackouts between prisoners and their families reached the highest level of the year, with about a week during which relatives of inmates in dozens of facilities could not receive any news from them.
On October 24, Cubalex published for the first time an interactive list of political prisoners documenting 679 individuals, while Prisoners Defenders recorded 1,351 political prisoners in Cuba at the end of September.
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